


The Art of Precious Scars

by IAmANonnieMouse



Series: Author's Favorites [3]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, Phillipa POV, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:26:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27703429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IAmANonnieMouse/pseuds/IAmANonnieMouse
Summary: When Phillipa was a little girl, she knew what her parents were doing, but she didn’t understand.She knew that they were researching and developing something that made them very excited. She knew it involved a shiny box with clear, octopus-tentacle tubes, and she knew it made them sleepy.But she didn’t understand what exactly that shiny box did, or how dangerous it could be.And she certainly didn’t understand that it would be the thing that tore her family apart.
Series: Author's Favorites [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1377778
Comments: 15
Kudos: 21
Collections: InceptGen





	The Art of Precious Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mizunoir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizunoir/gifts).



> Dedicated to [Mizunoir](https://mizunoir.tumblr.com/) who got me thinking about Phillipa and James post-Inception and somehow made me think about them SO MUCh that this fic happened. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY, MIZU.
> 
> Also written for the [InceptGen](https://inceptgen.tumblr.com/) fest that's running until November 30th because we always say yay for more gen fics!!

*

Phillipa's reading at a small outdoor cafe when a light voice asks, "Excuse me, is this seat taken?"

She looks up. A young woman is standing there, wearing an enviably whimsical dress and expectant smile. Phillipa glances around and counts three tables that are empty. She turns back to the woman and arches a brow.

"Well, is it?" the woman asks.

Phillipa ponders her options, taking just long enough that the woman's smile starts to falter, then says, "No. It's not."

The woman sits with flattering speed. "I'm Mariele."

"Phillipa."

"You have almost no accent," Mariele says. "Where did you learn?"

Abruptly, Phillipa realizes they've been speaking in French, and she shakes herself. "Non. I mean, no, I—” She closes her eyes. "My mother was born here."

"Ah, parfait." Mariele smiles. "And she taught you?"

"No."

Mariele hesitates. "Oh."

"She died when I was a kid." The words come out harsh, challenging. Phillipa feels a flicker of satisfaction when Mariele's smile falls and their conversation dies before it can truly begin.

This is how it always is. How it'll always be.

Phillipa waves over the next server she sees and asks for the check. There isn't anything left for her and Mariele to talk about.

*

She's halfway back to her latest hostel when her phone rings. She answers without looking and says, "What is it now?"

"Pip!" James shouts. "Pip, I got a job!"

She smiles. "That's great, doing what?"

"It's gonna be so epic," James says. "Uncle Arthur said I could come, and he'd pay me out of his share, and—”

"Wait," Phillipa snaps. "Arthur? James, you promised me—”

"No, actually, I didn't," James fires back. “You just ordered me to do something, and thought I would obey.”

Zero to sixty, halfway through a fight before they’ve officially started it. They’ve always been like this. Sometimes she wonders if they would’ve been different if their mother hadn’t jumped. If _she_ would’ve been different.

Phillipa sighs and tries to douse the flames. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just worry about you, that’s all.”

James grunts. “You’re not worried about me. You hate dreamshare.”

“I do,” Phillipa says. “I don’t get why you don’t feel the same way.”

“Pip—”

“It killed our mom, and it took our dad.”

“Dad came back,” James says, and it’s the same argument, over and over again. “And you don’t know that about mom.”

“They were experimenting, James!” Phillipa runs a hand through her hair. “You don’t remember, but I had to feed you—feed _us_ —while they were lying on the floor, completely unconscious, for _days_! And then, when they finally woke up, mom was never the same.”

The phone is silent, and Phillipa closes her eyes, cursing herself. Putting out the fire with gasoline.

This is how it always is. How it'll always be.

“It’s just an extraction,” James says. “I won’t tell you more. I should’ve known…” He sighs loudly. “I’ll be in your area. I thought I’d ask you to lunch. You know, if you think we can get through a meal without killing each other.”

“I’m sorry,” Phillipa says again. She reaches her hostel but hovers outside, pacing on the sidewalk. She doesn’t deserve these olive branches, but James keeps extending them. It’s the same part of him that refuses to see dreamshare for the danger it is, but she can’t fault him for that. It’s why she loves him. “I’d love to do lunch. Call me when you can, we’ll figure it out.”

“Okay,” James says quietly. “I have to go. Bye, sis.”

“Bye.”

She hangs up and closes her eyes, burying her face in her hands for a single moment of weakness before she puts herself back together and heads inside.

*

When Phillipa was a little girl, she knew what her parents were doing, but she didn’t understand.

She knew that they were researching and developing something that made them very excited. She knew it involved a shiny box with clear, octopus-tentacle tubes, and she knew it made them sleepy. 

But she didn’t understand what exactly that shiny box did, or how dangerous it could be.

And she certainly didn’t understand that it would be the thing that tore her family apart.

*

James calls her three days later, and they meet at the same cafe where Mariele asked to share a table. Phillipa glances around and tries not to feel guilty.

“How have you been?” James asks. “You know, considering.”

“Fine.” Phillipa sips her tea. “I’ve been keeping busy. Narrowing down my thesis topic, TA-ing some classes, you know. You?”

James nods. “Good. I think Uncle Arthur might be ready to kill me, but in a good way, you know? He, uh. He and Eames dropped in to visit dad, and I kept bugging them until Eames talked Arthur into letting me tag along.”

“How’s dad?” Phillipa asks, the words bitter on her tongue. 

“He’s okay.” James shrugs. “He misses you. We both do.”

Phillipa drinks her tea to choke down the words that want to spill out. “I’m doing well.”

“I know.” James smiles. “So, uh. What are you thinking for your thesis?”

“Not sure yet. No matter what, it’s going to be pretty niche.”

“That’s okay. As long as you think it’s important.”

Phillipa glances at him. “I do. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t.”

James nods. Glances away. Plays with his napkin.

“You have a totem?” Phillipa asks. 

“What?” James blinks. “Of course.”

“Okay.”

It isn’t really a comfort. Totems can be corrupted, twisted. Uncle Arthur had said that her parents were the ones to invent them, to help you know if you were in someone else’s dream.

 _But then,_ she had said, placing a hand on his knee, _how do you know if you’re trapped in your own dream?_

“Pip?”

Phillipa looks up. “Sorry, what?”

James frowns. “Are you okay? Really?”

“Yeah.” She forces a smile. “I’m just worried about you. Please be careful?”

James’ face softens. “Always, sis. It’s you and me. I’m not going anywhere.”

*

Phillipa has her own totem. It seems silly, maybe, for someone who abhors dreamshare to keep something so intrinsically tied to it. But she’s had it ever since her mother died.

It’s small, portable. Nondescript. She never goes anywhere without it.

But it plagues her, after her lunch with James. The memory of Arthur kneeling at her side and explaining why there was a small lump in his pocket. 

She’s never asked her father what really happened that night. By the time he came home, two years later, she thought she knew enough, so she never went to him for answers.

She didn’t want to need them.

She knows her parents were involved in dreamshare from the early days.

She knows her parents ended up in a dream that lasted much longer than it should have.

She knows that, afterwards, her mother was never the same.

She knows that, afterwards, her mother jumped out of a hotel window.

_How do you know if you’re trapped in your own dream?_

Phillipa palms her totem and lets her mind spin.

*

“I want to do some research about dreamshare,” she tells her thesis advisor.

“Hm,” Dr. Rollins says. He’s a short man with thinning hair who is a terror in the classrooms but extremely mellow outside of them. “What more is there to research?”

It’s been over twenty years since Phillipa’s father came home. Fifteen years since dreamshare was dragged out of the underground and arrived on the public market. They sell recreational PASIVs now, with somnacin barely strong enough to connect two people. But the public doesn’t know any better, and people buy it in droves.

“Recognition that one is in a dream,” Phillipa says. 

“That’s what totems are for,” Rollins argues.

“They tell you if you’re in someone else’s dream,” Phillipa says. “But what if you’re trapped in your own?”

Rollins looks at her consideringly. She’s never told him her background, and he’s never offered his own. But sometimes, she thinks he says her last name with just a little too much reverence, and she wonders if he ever crossed paths with her father.

She’s never going to ask. She doesn’t need to know.

“If you can bring me a more concrete plan, Ms. Cobb, I will consider it,” he says finally.

“Thank you,” she says, and she means it.

*

She hasn’t exactly lied to James, but she hasn’t told him the truth, either.

She’s getting a PhD, but not in Neuroscience. Not exactly. It’s the heading that the university gave her when they agreed to let her build her own degree, with the help of Rollins browbeating them into submission. He read her essays and spoke with her privately, and he went to bat for her when the university was still hovering around indecision.

She’s grateful for his intervention, even though she knows it was far from selfless. Everyone has an ulterior motive; it’s just a matter of finding it.

Whatever his reasons, Rollins took her completely under his wing. He has access to more information on dreamshare than anyone who isn’t actively running jobs, and he has given Phillipa free reign over it.

She intends to use it to learn about every inch of dreamshare—its strengths, its weaknesses, its dangers. 

Her childhood taught her that the most dangerous thing in the world is the unknown. And that is why she will arm herself with knowledge.

*

Rollins has everything from schematics on each model of the PASIV to notes on the chemical structure of somnacin. There are even diagrams of brain waves during natural dreams compared to PASIV-induced ones.

But there’s next to nothing about the actual mechanics of shared dreaming.

As Phillipa closes another binder, she realizes she’s going to need a different source of information. 

_Just pick a different thesis topic,_ her mind says.

But there’s no way. This idea has sunken its hooks into her, and she won’t back out now.

 _Hey,_ she texts James, _can you have Arthur call me? Nothing urgent. Just a couple questions._

That night, as she’s getting ready for bed, her phone rings.

“Hey, Pippa,” Arthur says, voice quiet and warm and achingly familiar. “How can I help?”

*

In the two years that her father was gone, Arthur visited monthly. Now that she’s older and understands that he was on the run with her father every step of the way, Phillipa wonders how the hell he managed it.

He always brought gifts for them, and he always read them a bedtime story every night.

And when he had to leave, he hugged them tightly, so tightly. He never let go until they did.

After her father returned, he didn’t visit for a year. He sent presents, and cards, but he didn’t come.

At the time, Phillipa had hated him. She’d thought he was just like her father, turning into a name on a mailing label and nothing more. But she understands now, years and years later.

He needed a break from her father. Just like her.

*

“You told me once that totems tell you if you’re in someone else’s dream,” she says.

Arthur’s breaths blow gently through the phone. It’s been months since they last spoke, maybe even years. When Phillipa left home, she cut herself off from everyone except her brother—and even with James, they only spoke every few weeks at best. But Arthur’s voice holds no anger or bitterness, and for the second time in days, she feels unworthy. 

“Yes,” Arthur says. “That’s true. I probably told you that your parents invented the idea.”

She nods even though he can’t see her. “But how can you tell if you’re in your own dream?”

There’s a pause. Then Arthur says, “Phillipa? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says, and it’s almost the truth. “I haven’t been dreaming. I’m not asking because of that. I’m just…” She bites her lip. “I’m picking out a topic for my thesis. And I wanted to know if someone has already solved this problem before I try.”

“Hm,” Arthur says. “Let me look into a few things.”

Usually, this is where he would hang up, but he hesitates, then says, “You know you can call me for anything, day or night.”

“I know.” Phillipa smiles slightly. “Thank you, Uncle Arthur.”

He sighs. “You don’t ever have to thank me, Pippa.”

He hangs up then, and Phillipa sits on her bed and clutches her phone to her chest.

*

Arthur sends her an email with the subject line _Findings_. The email itself is surprisingly short.

_Asked around. Nobody had a good answer. Eames is the only one with something like a solution — if he can’t forge anyone, he’s most likely awake. But there are plenty of different somnacin blends out there, and some can prevent a forger from changing themselves. So it isn’t foolproof._

_If you want to know more about the somnacin, I can put you in touch with Yusuf._

_Otherwise, I say you’re good to pursue this line of thought._

_If you want to meet, or come on a job to get more information, just let me know._

_Love, Arthur_

*

She shadows them on their Paris job. It’s the one James had been so excited about. She tells James she wants to see what he’s doing, so she won’t worry so much about him. Eames is there, too, and he gives Phillipa a bone-crushing hug.

“You’ve gotten big,” he says, lifting her off the ground. “I feel so bloody old right now.”

The first day, she just sits in on the meetings, listens to their planning and studies their architect’s models. 

“I can’t build it,” Ariadne says, “but this is where I’ll put some penrose steps and trap them all in one loop.”

It’s mind-boggling, the things they can do in dreams. Phillipa refused to let herself learn about it because she was so intent on hating it. But now, in this quiet warehouse with the sun streaming in through the wide windows, she can see why her parents were so enamored with it.

They had always been dreamers. And this was a way to make their dreams into a reality.

The second day, Arthur takes her under for a test run. They walk up and down the streets of her childhood neighborhood, talking about nothing in particular. He takes her inside her own home and shows her how closets can open to other buildings, how attic staircases spin endlessly into the sky, and how basements lead to the inner recesses of the mind.

“In dreams,” he says, “the answers you’re looking for are usually down.” His face tightens. “Just don’t go too far.”

“Is that what happened to my parents?” she asks.

Arthur swallows. “Yes.”

She stares down at the bottom of the cellar stairs, hidden in shadow, and decides she still doesn’t need answers that badly. Not now. Maybe not ever.

When they wake up, she blinks, disoriented. “It felt so real.”

“Dreams feel real when you’re in them,” Arthur says. “It’s only after you’re awake that you notice it was strange.”

The corner of his mouth is pinched. Phillipa says, “Did my father say that?”

He nods once, but offers nothing else.

*

She walks into her next meeting with Dr. Rollins with a stack of notes in hand. She lays out all the research she has gathered, which is namely confirmation of a lack of knowledge. She explains the way members of dreamshare seem to refuse to acknowledge the dangers of being caught in their own dreams, as if burying their heads in the sand will prevent it from happening to them.

She talks about forging, how it is the only solution anyone has suggested, but even that can be manipulated with the right chemicals. She talks about dream levels, dreams within dreams, and the time dilation that accompanies them.

Rollins watches her intently and doesn’t interrupt once. When she’s finished, and her voice is hoarse, he offers her a glass of water and says, “Do you know what your parents were involved in?”

She swallows the water. “I know they were in dreamshare. But that’s all.”

Rollins nods. “Come with me.”

*

He takes her into his archive, then unlocks a back door she hadn’t realized was there. In a flash, her brain disconnects from her body, and she half-expects a grassy field or a shopping mall to be on the other side.

She reaches for her totem and clutches it tightly.

She’s only been under once, and she’s already unsure.

The back door leads to a small room, no bigger than a broom closet, filled with boxes of documents.

“This,” Rollins says, “was your parents’ research.”

Phillipa blinks. “All of this?”

He nods. “I think you should read it.”

*

A week later, she sits in his office and says, “Did you work with them?”

“Yes,” he says, “and no. I was little more than an assistant at the time. Just dipping my toes in the water. They were…the pioneers of their time.”

“They’re the ones who learned how to make multiple levels in a dream.”

“Yes.”

“And they’re the ones who discovered paradoxical architecture.”

“Yes.” Rollins folds his hands on his stomach. “The only thing they didn’t discover was forging. That credit goes to a man in the SAS, I believe.”

Phillipa’s mind immediately goes to Eames.

“You have quite a legacy, Ms. Cobb,” Rollins says, “even if you prefer not to acknowledge or accept it. But if you truly wish to pursue this topic for your thesis, I think you will need to learn about it.”

*

Phillipa spends the next few weeks poring over their lab books and publications. It’s strange, almost, to read their notes, feel their excitement. This is the closest she’s felt to her parents in her entire life.

She digs through years of work in days, reading until her eyes are practically glued shut, hungry for answers, for a way to understand why both of her parents chose this over their own children.

And then, she finds it.

 _How many levels can exist in a dream?_ the page starts. It’s written in her father’s blocky letters. _We went so deep that we lost count. We built for years, until our bodies withered and we grew old. We were down there for so long that Mal forgot we were dreaming._

Then, underneath, in her mother’s elegant script:

_How do you know if you’re trapped in your own dream?_

*

She buys the plane ticket before she can talk herself out of it. She packs just enough to get her through the journey, then calls James to tell him where she’s going.

“Are you sure about this, sis?” he asks.

“No,” she admits. “But I need to find out.”

Her house looks exactly the same as she remembers it. She reaches for her totem, remembering the test run with Arthur, and the impossible architecture waiting inside. 

Already, the totem is becoming her life line, even though she knows it’s an imperfect solution.

She rings the bell even though she has a key. She hears footsteps, then the lock clicks, and the door opens.

Her father has aged in the years she’s been gone, the lines in his face growing more pronounced. But there’s a quietness to him that she’s never seen before, a patience where there used to be hunger.

“Phillipa,” he says, voice cracking. “Is it really you?”

“Hi, dad,” she says, and he pulls her into a hug.

*

He takes her bag and brings her inside, talking a mile a minute. He’s redecorated a little, but the small touches her mother had made are still there, unchanged.

“I left your room the same,” he says. “It’s probably weird now, but I didn’t want to lose that part of you.”

He puts her bag in her room and walks her through the rest of the house. He talks about teaching and empty nest-ing and dreaming. Natural dreams, not somnacin-induced ones.

He tells her that James is running dreamshare jobs with Arthur now. He asks her if she’s been in touch with him, if she knows what role he’s taking on. He asks her if she’s gone under before. If she understands now how magical it is. How life-changing.

He asks her if she loves it as much as he does. 

They end up on the porch, and he finally pauses to take a breath, and Phillipa says, “I came here to ask about my mother.”

Her father stops short then sits abruptly. “O-okay,” he says. “What did you want to know?”

“I’m working under Dr. Rollins,” she says, and her father twitches. “He has all your research still. Yours and mom’s. I know you invented totems, and I know you know that they’re not perfect. I want to do my thesis on ways for the dreamer to know if they’re trapped in their own dream.”

Her father inhales slowly.

“In your notes, you said you both went so deep you forgot you were dreaming. After you woke up, my mother was never the same. What happened down there? How did she remember?”

And her father rubs his hands on his pants and closes his eyes and says, “She didn’t.”

*

He spins her a tale about a place called limbo, where there’s no gap between thought and creation. A place so far down that minutes equal decades, that still holds the crumbling remnants of the city he and Mal created years ago.

He talks about how they built from memory, how it made it easier to forget they were dreaming. How he broke into Mal’s childhood home, and left her totem spinning, spinning, spinning.

“I just wanted to remind her,” he says. “To help her. But when we woke up, she still thought it was a dream.”

“Dad,” Phillipa says, the word foreign on her tongue, “how do you know if you’re trapped in your own dream?”

Dad laughs brokenly. “You don’t. There’s no way. You can’t rely on someone else to tell you, because that person could be a projection you’ve created. You can’t trust your own totem, because in your dream, it can behave however you want. And when you’re in limbo, what you believe becomes reality. Even if you know that, during dreams, your totem behaves one way, if you’re in limbo, and you believe it’s reality, your totem will act to reflect that.”

“You remembered,” Phillipa says. “How is it that you remembered, but she forgot?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question ever since we woke up.”

They sit on the porch until the sun sets, both of them waiting for answers that won’t come.

*

“I’m sorry I left,” he says that night as she’s heading for her room, still decorated by a teenager. “I’m sorry I was gone for so long.”

She freezes in the hallway and closes her eyes.

 _Don’t,_ she thinks. _There’s no need to ruin this now._

But her father keeps talking.

He says, “I know you never forgave me.”

He says, “I know that’s why you left.”

He says, “I’ll tell you for the rest of my life: I’m sorry, Phillipa.”

He says, “I was just trying to do the right thing.”

“That’s bullshit,” she says without turning around. “You didn’t give us a second thought.”

Her father pauses. “Phillipa—”

“You ran. And you left us behind. I lost my mother and father in the span of weeks.”

“Phillipa—”

“You could’ve taken us with you. You could’ve sent grandma plane tickets after you were settled. You could’ve done _anything_ other than what you did, taking on ridiculous jobs and dragging Arthur along with you on suicide missions, saying you needed to get home. And you have the fucking nerve to stand there and tell me you were trying to _do the right thing?”_

“You lost your mother,” he says. “I lost my wife. Worse than that, I’m the reason she’s dead. Okay? I did something to her down there. I planted an idea in her mind. And that idea took root and grew until it killed her.”

“I understand,” Phillipa says. “But I also understand that dreamshare meant more to you than we ever did. It still does."

*

She flies back to Paris the next morning. She packs her bags in the early dawn, and takes some of her childhood things with her. Her farthest wall is covered in sketches James had made when they were in school. She puts them in a folder and takes them all.

Something tells her she won’t be coming back.

When she gets to the airport, she asks the woman at the front desk for the first ticket they have, and she calls James while she’s waiting to board.

“You were right,” she says, ignoring the tears welling in her eyes. “It was a bad idea.”

“Pip,” James says softly, “where are you? I’ll come meet you.”

“I’m flying back into Paris,” she whispers. When she closes her eyes, her cheeks grow damp. “Can you pick me up?”

“Of course. I’ll see you soon.”

*

James is waiting for her as promised, and he wordlessly pulls her into a hug. “It’s okay,” he says. “We knew he was an asshole, right?”

She sniffles into his shoulder. “You like him.”

James shrugs. “I love my sister more.”

He takes her to the hotel he and Arthur and the team are staying at. It’s almost funny to her that they’re still here. When he called her with his news, she was still a disillusioned woman running from her past. Now she’s here, a woman who’s selected a thesis centered on dreamshare and just flown from Paris to L.A. and back again to speak to her father for the first time in ages.

“What’s happening to me?” she asks, only half-joking.

“Nothing,” James says. “You’re just finally looking at the things you’ve been ignoring.”

“Don’t be wise,” she mutters. “You’re supposed to be my dumb little brother.”

He pulls her closer and puts on the TV. “You know,” he says, after they’ve been watching a stupid sitcom for twenty minutes, “for someone who hated dreamshare, you sure picked a great field to go into to avoid it.”

She sighs.

“Arthur vetted him, you know. Rollins. The minute you said you were talking to him, Arthur started a background check. He used to run jobs with our parents, back in the day.”

“He was their research assistant,” she says. “They worked at the same university I’m going to. What are the chances?”

James hums. “I think that’s exactly how things were supposed to turn out.”

The episode finishes, and a new one starts. Phillipa lets more of her weight lean on her brother, and she wonders how he can still be so damn optimistic.

*

“Oh, wow,” James says, pulling out his drawings. “Where did you find these?”

He’s helping her unpack her things, because she’s sick of doing it. “Dad didn’t change my room at all,” she says. “They were still hanging on my wall.”

“Can I take some?”

“They’re yours, James. You can take them all.”

He shakes his head and holds up one. “This is the one I want.”

It’s a sketch of their mother, hair blowing in an invisible breeze. Her eyes are soft and sad, and Phillipa’s breath catches in her throat, because she died long before James should’ve been able to remember her. After their mother died, their father had packed away all his photos of her as if she never existed.

“That's amazing, James. How did you draw that?”

James blushes slightly. “I begged Uncle Arthur to take me into a dream. She’s one of his projections. We had tea.”

Phillipa stares. “You what?”

“Yeah.”

“James.”

James hunches his shoulders. "Look, back then, I did a lot of things you didn't know about. This was one of them."

Phillipa sighs. "I’m not going to start a fight over this.”

“Okay.”

“But I think it’s smart that you didn’t tell me that before.”

“Yeah.”

She glances at him and smiles. “I’m sorry. It’s amazing that you were able to draw that. It looks just like her.”

James glances down at it and flicks the edge of the paper. “Hey, sis?”

“Mhm?”

“What are you doing your thesis on? Really?”

So Phillipa sits on the bed next to him and tells him everything.

*

She goes back to her hostel so James can focus on his job with Arthur and the others. She spends her days holed up on Rollins archive, writing stream-of-consciousness notes on what she knows about dreamshare, limbo, and her mother.

She still wants to find a solution to her problem. But she isn’t sure she’ll be able to come up with one.

And then James calls one afternoon as she's walking back to her hostel, saying, "Pip! You aren't going to believe it!"

It's like deja vu, but this time Phillipa smiles and laughs and says, "What? What won't I believe?"

"I think I solved your problem!" James says. "Can you come over?"

*

“Most people can’t change their appearance when they’re under,” Eames says. They’re all scattered around James' hotel room, stuffing themselves with room service. Arthur said he would put it under expenses, so Eames took that as an invitation to order the entire menu.

“Forgers are the exception,” Arthur says. “But otherwise, the way we see ourselves is pretty ingrained in our subconscious, and nothing will change that.”

“So,” James says, bouncing excitedly, “if someone were to tattoo you in a dream, it would always be there when you were dreaming.”

“As long as you’re not a forger,” Phillipa says.

Eames shrugs. “I told Arthur, I don’t really need another totem. I’ve only encountered an anti-forging somnacin blend once, and that was after I’d been rather forcefully hit over the head and shoved in a van, so I saw it coming.”

“So,” James says louder, “what do you think, Pip? Will you let me tattoo you in a dream?”

Phillipa frowns. “Me? And since when do you know how to do tattoos?”

James blushes. "Remember when I said I did a lot of stuff during high school that you didn't know about?"

Phillipa nods slowly.

"Well," James says, "I may have been best friends with the son of the guy who owned the tattoo parlor by our school. And I may have begged him to teach me until he took me on as an apprentice. Maybe."

Phillipa stares. "Are you—wait. That's where you went after school every day?"

James nods. 

"I thought you were hanging out with potheads," Phillipa admits. 

“You were just focused on graduating and getting out of there,” James says. “It’s okay, Pip. I get it.”

She shifts awkwardly. “So, you have tattoos?”

He pulls up the corner of his shirt. There’s a tattoo on his side, a set of two interlocking rings with their birth dates.

“You and me, sis,” he says quietly. "Always."

She reaches over and hugs him tightly. “Okay. Let’s try it.”

*

Arthur brought a PASIV with him, so they go under together, all four of them. Phillipa opens her eyes to the tattoo parlor James apprenticed in.

He ducks into the nearest work stall and calls, “Who wants to be my first victim?”

Eames grins and says, “I'll never say no to a free tattoo.”

Arthur sighs and says, “No, Eames, you can’t be our control. You change your tattoos all the time in dreams.”

Eames pouts. “Stop being precise, darling. You’re stealing my fun.”

Arthur rolls his eyes and unbuttons his dress shirt. He’s wearing a white undershirt beneath it. “James,” he says, “I’ll do it.”

“Sweet.” James grins. “What do you want?”

“Sniper round,” Arthur says, and Eames grins like a lovesick fool.

“Where?”

Arthur points to the inside of his forearm, just below the crook of his elbow.

“Darling,” Eames murmurs.

“Shut up, Eames,” Arthur says.

*

They all wake up after Arthur’s tattoo is finished, and Arthur obligingly takes off his shirt, ignoring Eames’ wolf whistle. His skin is completely unblemished.

They go under again, and the tattoo is there, shiny and new. 

“Perfect,” James says, grinning. “Pip? What do you want to get?”

She lowers herself into the chair and smiles at her little brother and says, “Surprise me.”

*

Weeks later, she’s sitting in Rollins’ office trying not to fidget as he reads through her first draft. It's nowhere near ready and needs a lot more research to back it up, but it's the concrete plan he asked for, and she hopes he can see that.

“Hm,” he says, and she looks up, but he’s only halfway through. She rubs idly at her shoulder and wonders if it would be rude to start playing mindless games on her phone.

“Well, Ms. Cobb,” Rollins says, and she jumps to attention. “This is certainly inventive.”

“It works,” she says. “On anyone who isn’t a forger. My brother tattooed his entire team, and it worked perfectly. I just need to widen my pool and talk to more people in dreamshare."

He nods and smiles slightly. “Do you think your brother would be open to a walk-in appointment?”

She lets a small smile grow on her face. “You like it?”

“I like it,” he says, and he reaches across his desk to shake her hand.

*

James sets up shop in Paris, to stay close to Phillipa.

"We spent so long apart," he argues. "I want to be able to see you every day until I'm sick of you."

She sits in his tattoo parlor and chats with everyone who comes in. She learns about the perils of dreamshare, but also the wonder. It isn't safe, but then what in life is? 

An architect tells her about the first time he built a skyscraper. A chemist describes her first experimental somnacin blend. An extractor explains how they cracked their first job. And Phillipa begins to understand.

Then one afternoon, she blows into James' shop, Rollins' latest batch of edits tucked under her arm. She scans the room quickly, then pauses, her eyes lingering on a woman tucked in the far corner, wearing a wonderfully whimsical dress and thoughtful gaze.

She slowly approaches and says in French, “Excuse me, is this seat taken?”

Mariele looks up, eyes wide, then cautiously begins to smile. “Actually," she says, "I've been saving it for you."

*

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to my mouse spouse [deinvati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deinvati) for coming up with the tattoos idea :smooches: you're the best!


End file.
